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More than half a decade from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the most serious period of the credit crunch, the aftershocks are still being felt. But they are getting weaker, and signs over the past 12 months suggest the world’s financial industry is beginning to get over its most profound crisis in several generations.

1) The industry navel-gazing reached a new peak

In April there was the Salz Review into Barclays, in June there was the Parliamentary Banking Commission’s report on changing banking for good, in November there was the Large Report into the Royal Bank of Scotland. And that was just in the UK.

At the same time a number of senior bankers like Rich Ricci of Barclays and Stephen Hester of the Royal Bank of Scotland – who, rightly or wrongly, became synonymous with the Ancien Régime – departed the scene.

But it was the closest that the euro area has got to a proper bail-in with creditors (including depositors) losing money when banks went bust. Previous bailouts resulted in losses being socialised, thus adding to Europe’s already unsustainable debt burden. There were worries that it would lead to bank runs in Cyprus (capital controls were put in place to guard against this possibility) and other peripheral eurozone countries.

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But there were also hopes that the painful process would make depositors more mindful of the risks they are running and thus start the long process of ending moral hazard.

3) JP Morgan was fined $13 billion

Time will tell whether the whopping $13 billion that JP Morgan had to shell out to settle over mortgage-backed securities sold before the financial crisis represents the peak of crunch reparations or serves merely as a foothill to even more mountainous payments.

Brave would be the person who bet that banking cupboards had been cleared of boom-time skeletons. But there was definitely something cathartic about arguably the world’s most successful bank stumping up for activities that helped sow the seeds to the credit crunch. That the majority of those activities were carried out by firms that JP Morgan later purchased – Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual – may also help lay those ghosts to rest.

4) Mark Carney held out an olive branch to the industry

History may come to see the post crisis era as the age of the central banker such has been the influence of the likes of Ben Bernanke at the US Federal Reserve and Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank in trying to dig the world economy out of its slump. So, for one of these celebrity technocrats to publicly endorse the positive contribution of the financial industry, as Bank of England governor Mark Carney did in an October speech, felt significant. To be sure, the endorsement was couched in chunky caveats. Nevertheless, it was a big deviation from the attitude of Carney’s predecessor Sir Mervyn King and, perhaps, signalled a new entente between regulators and regulatees.

5) US regulators approved the Volcker Rule

Strip away the anger, acronyms and technical detail and the changes in banking regulation boil down to what banks should and should not be allowed to do. Before the credit crunch it could best be summed up as: anything goes; since the meltdown it has become: some things, not so much.

International regulators believe that banks shouldn’t, in effect, use deposits and implicit government guarantees to make what amount to one-way bets. What sounds obvious in theory is, of course, fiendishly difficult to realise in practice.

The Volcker Rule is the best attempt yet. For all its flaws and complexity it suggests that the post-crisis regulatory agenda is on its way to being settled – at least in the US.